Each One An Antidote To The One

Poetry Is The Language We Speak In The Most Terrifying Or Ecstatic Passages Of Our Lives. But The Very Word Poetry Scares People. They Think Of Their Grade School Teachers Reciting 'hiawatha' And They Groan.

I Myself Hate That Old Hemingwayesque Paradigm Of The Writer As Prizefighter And I Have Tried Hard To Create An Alternate One For Myself. When Anne Sexton Admonished Me, "we Are All Writing God's Poem," I Took It To Mean There Should Be No Competition Between Writers Because We Are All Involved In A Common Project, A Common Prayer. But To Gore's And Norman's Generation, Particularly Those Male Writers Who Served In The Second World War, The Prizefighter Paradigm Remains.

The Passion That One Soul Hath For God Cannot Be Judged By Another.

My Mother Wanted Me To Be Her Wings, To Fly As She Never Quite Had The Courage To Do. I Love Her For That. I Love The Fact That She Wanted To Give Birth To Her Own Wings.

I Thought Of The Nameless Inventor Of The Bathtub. I Was Somehow Sure It Was A Woman. And Was The Inventor Of The Bathtub Plug A Man?